SupportOps Drive NinjaRMM’s Customer Success Rate
One of those areas often overlooked — the one with so much of that coveted rapid feedback — is support. In this episode of The New Stack Makers, we talk to Michael Shelton, vice president of global customer support at admin tool provider NinjaRMM, about closing the cultural distance to reach support teams to drive the post-customer experience.
SupportOps Drive NinjaRMM’s Customer Success Rate
When Shelton joined NinjaRMM five years ago, it was still a tiny team working on the then-new remote monitoring and management platform. The company didn’t have a support team yet — everyone was support. He admitted that back in the day they had a lot of bugs, but they used that to broach stronger customer relationships.
Shelton said they built an ethos that continues today, talking to customers like partners and, sometimes even therapists:
“You’re not wrong. Sounds like you’re having a really tough time. And sounds like we’re part of the cause of that. Let’s work together to figure out what the solution is.”
The NinjaRMM team realized they could use the close relationship between support and the customer to drive the product. What do the customers love? What are they super frustrated about? What are their use cases?
“The post-sales experience is significantly more important thank the pre-sales experience.” — Michael Shelton, NinjaRMM
While closing the support-product feedback loop is part of the developer relations trend, most companies still aren’t investing enough into support. And a lot of finger-pointing between sales and support. Shelton pointed to the “old, outdated philosophy, many companies follow — hiring cheap labor that only cares about getting through tickets fast.
He says NinjaRMM looks at every single customer interaction as a person, not a metric. It’s about focusing on how the customers feel about the relationship and working to solve problems together. He says post-sales support is all about conversations.
In fact, as part of NinjaRMM’s SupportOps, support drives a lot of feature requests and issue ranking, and are the first to talk in the daily stand-ups.
This isn’t just a nice to have. NinjaRMM’s support team focuses on one metric: the customer satisfaction score (CSAT). It’s 98%. And those other metrics? While their goals aren’t set on them, the SupportOps mentality means the other metrics just fall into place.
Photo by Wil Stewart on Unsplash.
